Member of National Assembly
Fuad Siniora has strong ties with the international financial community. Strongly pro-business, he is considered a moderate partisan of free trade. He was a very close adviser to late Rafik Hariri and he is very close to his son Saad Hariri. He served as finance minister from 1992 to 1998 and again from 2000 to 2004 during which he was the architect of the national debt that climbed from US $2 billion to US $50 billion. Siniora was the main architect of the Paris II Conference in November 2002 which allowed Lebanon to get US $2.6 billion and the Paris III Conference in January 2007 which pledged 13 billion dollars to Lebanon. He was accused of corruption and mismanagement after Hariri's ousting in 1998, in what was mainly viewed as a conflict between Hariri and Syria, and a Syrian-orchestrated move to keep him in line. Siniora was cleared of all charges in 2003 by the parliament and the Judicial Court. In 2002, he abolished most of Lebanon's duty taxes and introduced a Value Added Tax.
Read more about this topic: Fouad Siniora
Famous quotes containing the words member of, member, national and/or assembly:
“The very existence of society depends on the fact that every member of it tacitly admits he is not the exclusive possessor of himself, and that he admits the claim of the polity of which he forms a part, to act, to some extent, as his master.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“The essence of man is, discontent, divine discontent; a sort of love without a beloved, the ache we feel in a member we no longer have.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)
“The national distrust of the contemplative temperament arises less from an innate Philistinism than from a suspicion of anything that cannot be counted, stuffed, framed or mounted over the fireplace in the den.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)